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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
World
Rory Carroll

US airman who rescued film of A-bomb horrors is honoured at last

Lieutenant Dan McGovern at ground zero in Nagasaki on 9 September 1945.
Lieutenant Dan McGovern at ground zero in Nagasaki on 9 September 1945. Photograph: US National Archives

The photograph shows devastation in Nagasaki after the atomic bomb: a scorched wilderness where there was once a city. At its centre stands a lone man with a camera.

It was 9 September 1945 and Lt Daniel McGovern, a US Army Air Force cameraman, was documenting ground zero, the point directly below the bomb’s detonation four weeks earlier. Few would recognise McGovern, but the vision of apocalypse is familiar from documentary footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the second world war.

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